


Now We Won't Be Scarred

by CampionSayn



Category: The Triplets of Belleville
Genre: Animal POV, Gen, Post-Canon, Psychological Trauma, attempted suicide, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:30:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CampionSayn/pseuds/CampionSayn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young people look forward to the future. Old people like to remember the past. Unless something bad happens. At that point, young people can’t imagine what could come next and old people just want to fill the days forward with something different from what it was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Now We Won't Be Scarred

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eraina](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Eraina), [Kirra kills](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Kirra+kills).



> Dedication: To Eraina of FFdotNet, in homage to her fic Some Scars Cannot Be Healed, as that was the first and only Triplets of Belleville fic I have ever read or found to date. And to Kirra kills as this is another addition to my anti-bullying collective.

_-:-_  
Remember your name.  
Do not lose hope—what you seek will be found.  
Trust ghosts. Trust those you have helped to help you in their turn.  
-Instructions, by Neil Gaiman.

* * *

i.  
  
Champion didn’t for the life of him understand why he actually gone through with swallowing thirty aspirin ( _that is not a complete bottle as they were aspirin that belonged to his grandmother and had to be tiny because she had such a sensitive gag reflex before she had lived half a year in Belleville and those particular pills were from before she became acquainted with eating almost nothing but frogs_ ) when he had woken up from yet another night of sweating cold and nightmares of red wine in blood tubes, but the realization of what he had done after the thirtieth white pill slid down his throat hit his consciousness almost immediately.  
  
He dropped the little glass bottle _(well, little to him with his fingers long and spindly as spider legs_ ) and barely noticed that when it impacted the wood floorboards and shattered, the rest of the white pills bounded up in the air a few inches before scattering around the bathroom floor, under the bathtub, along the edge of the sink and two crunched under his heel as he bolted down the long staircase from his room, heading for the kitchen.  
  
It had been roughly two minutes since he had swallowed the first of the pills, so there was a chance--when he got to the cupboards with the salt for rich recipes and got a coffee mug promoting the Tour de France and filled it with water and dumped three shot glasses worth of the salt in the water and then swallowed it all whole—that the pills hadn’t started being eaten away by his stomach acids just yet.  
  
He vaguely remembers this trick of easy drug refusal only because it was advice given to him by one of the cyclists he’d been abducted with.   
  
_“It’s not pretty and it hurts, but it’s better than whatever might happen from ingested drugs,” the brunette drawled, melancholy for home and their equal shares of morphine the mafia’s bookkeeper hooked them up to after their evening meals making his eyes glass over, a smile carving his lips through no choice of his own, “I know this because aside from this life, I was a nurse. You wouldn’t believe how many people are drugged in nightclubs these days…”_  
  
Hands gripped painfully to the kitchen sink as the salt took action almost the second it curved along the back of his throat and passed his Adam’s Apple and Champion had never been so grateful that his grandma spent most mornings practicing music with the Triplets since they had moved from Belleville to the attic apartment of Madame Souza’s friend that still continued to drive the medical van for the Tour de France. He didn’t think he could explain away the whiteness coating his vomit like foam bubbles out in the ocean.  
  
Once the last of the awful tasting nausea passed and the inside of his nose burned from some of the salt in the water leaking from his nostrils, Champion considered over the mess in the sink, quietly counting about twenty-seven semisolid, grossly deformed circles that made him shake in misery and shame.  
  
 _(Three pills finished entirely in his stomach he supposed, but that wasn’t dangerous and actually that would help in about half of the hour with his throat getting soar from vomiting. He wouldn’t die from just three pills.)_  
  
Raising one hand from the sink, his skinny form leaning against it—sagging it would seem if he weighed a little more—he turned the faucet above the mess he had made and caught the handle for the hot water.   
  
The still white of the pills looked an awful lot like the whites of his fellow cyclist’s eyes (wet and round with little for coloring) right before that sadist bookkeeper shot him like a wrecked thoroughbred ( _then they were no whites of the eyes anymore—just red bubbles spilling across ebony pupils and coloring dark hair splayed against the ground and a smoking hole made through bone and)…._  
  
The water washed away the traces and Champion didn’t have to think for the few moments he just stood there before he would have to get dressed properly for the day and go out to the job he had lived off of before the whole problem with Belleville.  
  
ii.  
  
Madame Souza seemed to be enjoying herself, and Bruno was glad for that since she seemed to worry over her pup so often whenever she was home with him.  
  
A human her age shouldn’t have to worry about anything and Bruno had taken it upon himself to make sure she didn’t worry unless it was really important; his large body on his long legs following after her when she walked from her home to the home of those extremely tall females that--even after the chasing with the big and long metal boxy things that weren’t quite the same as **TRAINS** ( _involuntary thought, he would not growl while Madame was practicing and trying a new technique with her little fingers on those sticks_ ) but smelled and looked similar—still ate the little green hoppers they caught themselves.  
  
The tall females now lived with the fat male that put those awful smelling smoke sticks in his mouth and Madame liked to make noise with them in the metal cave of the man’s home and Bruno would be a good boy and lay just outside the cave until he was sure that Madame wasn’t going anywhere. When she was grinning and laughing with the tall females _(the one that played with the cold metal box always laughed loudest when they were playing things right, the one with the heeled shoes and the paper seemed to always pause the noise and make little chirrups when it seemed something was off and the one with the scary wind sucker seemed to eye Bruno whenever he got up, but didn’t say ‘ **No’** )_ Bruno would get up quietly and sneak off to go check on the pup a few hard grounds in the other direction.  
  
He usually got back before Madame noticed him gone, but if she was looking for him after he was done at the pup’s big cave with the metal on wheels and the black water everywhere, he would just lift up his leg when she saw him come back and mark a tree or a lamppost or the box on a stick that the **MAILMAN** stuck paper inside. Then she wouldn’t worry, she’d just scold him for marking territory that wasn’t his.  
  
When he turned the corner of the hard grounds, he checked to make sure the females were still laughing and making noise and then bounded off to the metal box cave of the pup and his fellow pack member from the territory across the big water.  
  
Bruno didn’t like being away from the pup for too long, but he trusted the bigger male the pup spent the day with, and he trusted Madame with her female pack members, so he kept his pace manageable. Bounding was all well and good when there was **FOOD** involved, but if there wasn’t he didn’t feel the need to make his breathing hard or miss the chance to spot a squirrel or a bitch on his walk.  
  



End file.
